Bindusara
Mauryan Emperor

Bindusara (r. c. 297 – c. 273 BCE) was the second Mauryan emperor of Magadha in ancient India. The ancient Greco-Roman writers called him Amitrochates, a name likely derived from his Sanskrit title Amitraghāta ("slayer of enemies").
Bindusara was the son of the dynasty's founder Chandragupta and the father of its most famous ruler Ashoka. His life is not documented as well as the lives of these two emperors. Much of the information about him comes from legendary accounts written several hundred years after his death. Bindusara consolidated the empire created by his father.
The 16th century Tibetan Buddhist author Taranatha credits his administration with extensive territorial conquests in southern India, but some historians doubt the historical authenticity of this claim.
Background
Ancient and medieval sources have not documented Bindusara's life in detail. Much of the information about him comes from Jain legends focused on Chandragupta and the Buddhist legends focused on Ashoka. The Jain legends, such as Hemachandra's Parishishta-Parvan were written more than a thousand years after his death.
“Bindusara” enters the record as mauryan Emperor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bindusara, Mauryan and Emperor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q315526. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bindusara” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.